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I sold Duppers dot Com, Amazon, and I wasn't I made generational wealth because I had nobody in my family ever made money before. But I was depressed. And my co founder at the time of Vinnie Burr, we basically both felt the same way. And after the money was wired to our bank account, we sort of said, like, we should be celebrating right now, and we're both like depressed, and we went and we had a drink and we're just like, man, Like, it just goes to show you
wasn't about the money. Like the mission that we had set out was kind of like crushed. Alex.
I feel like this is a very special episode of the Deal in the sense that we're bringing your business partner in for a different kind of conversation. Mark LORI, who is he to you?
Well, he's one of my best friends. He's one of my most important partners. He is a mentor, someone who I look up to, someone who we learn a lot from each other, and quite honestly, has been a great partnership because we have complimentary set of skills.
What I think about is this entrepreneur who keeps finding these new ways to win. So you think about selling diapers dot Com, that was a real company to Amazon for more than five hundred million dollars. That actually is an acquisition that he's not so happy with. So he goes and does it again. He creates jet dot Com, sells that to Walmart, and as you say, from deck to exit, in twenty six months, three plus billion dollars.
What unbelievable.
And now he's onto the next thing. Wonder he talks a lot about that. Big takeaway for me is his willingness to just either make a mistake or change his mind. You see, I would imagine almost every day talking to him, he is truly a phenomenal talent. He talks about six gear, which means working one hundred hours a week, twenty hours a day. He has an incredible engine, and this is his baby.
Wonder.
He's raised over a billion dollars. He just finished a seven hundred million dollar raise. The company just got a praised at three point five billion dollars.
I don't know if we have spent as much time with anyone yet talking so in depth and in such a nuanced way about entrepreneurship and the mechanics of it. It's just fascinating to hear someone who can talk so eloquently about what seemed to be soft things in very hard terms. On this episode of The Deal, Mark Lori, So, Mark, introduce yourself.
I'm Mark Laurie. I'm the founder and CEO of Wonder Group and co owner with Alex in the Minnesota Timberwalls and Links.
So we should say this is a little bit of a different episode of the Deal, but I think that's the best place. Like how do you guys come together? Like how does this all happen that these two guys are in business together.
What I'm going to start with you full disclosure, Mark and I are partners in several businesses, including the timbleles and the Links, as you said, But how we came together it was actually funny. Is around COVID and we had a mutual friend that kept telling me you have to meet this Walmart guy. And I was like, well, I'm really busy with the Mets now, but I wasn't expected to meet Mark, and we kind of hit it off right away. We're both in New Yorkers, we both
have two daughters. We both come from like humble beginnings, and I was like, wow, I don't know what this means about, but I want to do something with Mark, and that's kind of how it started.
What do you remember about that.
I remember being a big Yankees fan growing up a New Yorker, heard things about Alex before we met, and when we actually met on Zoom the first time, I was just a little bit surprised at how down to earthy was, how we shared a common set of values and he was different than I think the perception of him in the world with me and others, and yeah, we just really hit it off.
Alex and I have had this interview circled on the calendar for a long time because from my perspective for where I said, this is one of the most fascinating partnerships, especially when it comes to sports. So let's talk about that, because, as you mentioned, you're in the midst of the Mets deal when you guys meet, and that I believe creates this catalyst for you guys to really come together. What was it about sports that appealed to you Mark?
For me, I don't know, it wasn't like, well, I see a business opportunity to go after. It was driven by a passion for sports. I think Alex and I share this though, but we went to Minnesota and originally met with Glenn and Becky and they shared sort of the thirty year history of the team and how the city was sort of down on it. There's some events that happened in Minnesota, and it just sports have the ability to make people happy and aspire people and things.
And were both like this underdog. We would like the underdog. We feel like we're underdogs, and we kind of just felt this like story in Minnesota of the underdog, and I think we just had this drive to say, man, let's get in there and really, let's put our energy into this and let's like help turn this thing around. And if we do that, we could add a lot of collective happiness in the city, the fans. Players like
there was some drive for me. I don't know if you felt the same way, but it was like the money was second. There was like okay, and like NBA is a great league, it's growing, it's progressive. These team valuations been going up. It's going to be a good investment. But it wasn't like we're just searching like pe Firm or something, searching for some good investment. Interesting, it was really the story and the history of Minnesota that really was aspiring.
That gives me an opportunity to ask a question that I've asked Alex before, but I really want to ask the two of you together, which is kind of getting into this partnership because I would say I know a lot about him, I know a little bit about you, but like, how does it work.
I'll go first because I think this will give you an example. As I pulled the curtain back on our early days, I hope you don't mind me sharing some finances, but I'll do it anyways. So within the first ten days of Mark and I getting to know each other, it went from wow, okay, like we're in the middle of COVID, I'm in the middle of the Mets and pursuing that acquisition. In the first ten days, Mark send over his finances, like just the sheet, like his whole
balance sheet. I was like, Okay, that was quick, Like no, Nda, no, I mean just send it to me. I was like, okay, this is aggressive when that's quite an attachment. Yeah, I mean that's like first date boom. And then the second thing he did, he said, Hey, I like this. I like the way we're driving here, I'm in for twenty five million bucks. I'm like, wow, okay, finance is twenty five million bucks within ten days. He was so invested.
He's like, I'm good for two hundred let's go. And I was like, okay, this is my kind of partner man. But it was example of him trusting his gut, him being a New Yorker. We both loved the Mets. We thought it was an incredible opportunity. I would say, not the greatest business opportunity, but an opportunity we can exercise our passion what we can do for the city. We're talking about how can we impact young kids? Are on math. He's a math guy. I'm a baseball guy. So that's
how we started. And I very quickly found out I wanted to do things with Mark outside of the Mets and other things, and I can learn a lot from him, and I thought our skills were very complimentary to each other.
What did you see in him?
I think I was really impressed with Alex's intellect and empathy. I think we share a lot of the same core values. I think that struck me. I think Alex is very trusting. I think we know with trust comes from some great things, but there's also downside to it, and I think we're both similar in accepting the downside. Sometimes you're overly trusting, you get burned. That's kind of a byproduct, but there's something magical that happens when you trust. I think we
were both like loyal. I think that's important. I think we're both missionary, not mercenary. It's not about like every dollar, every penny, like striking a deal. We deal make the same way. I think when we did the deal with Glenn and Becky, it was very much like just kind of tell us what you want and we're good. We didn't have to like squeeze or anything. And then I think even when we operate on a data basis, we do a lot of stuff handshake, there's like things that
we're signing together. It's very very trusting, so that builds, that builds a bond. I think Alex is also incredibly knowledgeable, obviously in sports and yes the business sports, but more he's been in and knows what it's like to be a player at the most elite level, and it's been super helpful I think with helping to mentor the players on the walls understand what it means to create a great culture.
And so were you guys like texting all day? Like do you call each other?
Like what is that?
What is this relationship?
Look like?
Yeah, a lot. I mean sometimes we talked five or six times a day. I mean that's been the average lately. But you know, even with Glenn and Becky, their experience was so good. When we went down to Apris in Minnesota, we did not negotiate. He said the terms price, We did it and.
We got in.
And in all the conversations we've had around the Timberwolves, I don't think we've ever talked about revenues. It's really been about how do we make it better?
Inputs versus outputs exactly? Exactly would say more about that, inputs versus outputs. You know, like in a company, you could either be focused on what is the revenue, what is the profit? Those are like output numbers. I care less about that. I care more about the inputs that will lead to good outputs in the future. So making sure because you can you can hit out get good outputs with bad inputs.
So you're talking about like sustainable, the right hires, the right investments, the right I think in order to create a sustainable culture of winning and eventually profit over a long.
Sustain period of time. You have to make the right investments in the inputs that will lead to the outputs. Maybe not today because it's an investment, but five or ten or twenty years down the road.
So let's go back as we go through your business life. You know, as we were researching this, and obviously Alex knows so much about you already, and I've gotten a chance to talk to you a few times. But if you look at type in diapers dot com or jet dot com into Google, they lead you just to some interesting places. They led you to some interesting places too. So take us into your life as an entrepreneur diapers dot com. Just let's start there.
I have to say, though, I was born an entrepreneur. Yeah. Yeah, When I was four years old, you know, the chief just said what do you want to be when you grow up? And I said, I want to be a farmer. And she was like, farmer. Why farmer? And I said, because they grow stuff from nothing. And that was sort of just the way I was sort of like born into the world. I loved the idea of growing stuff
from nothing. As a kid, I didn't know anything other than farmer, grows stuff from nothing, didn't know about startups and things like that. And my parents had me when they were twenty years old. So I spent a lot of time with my grandmother and grandfather, and so I came home. I was the first person in my family ever to go to college. So I came home with this this crayon thing that said what do you want to be when you grew up? And I said farmer?
And I showed it to my grandmother and she says farmer. No, No, no doctor or lawyer. And I said no, no, farmer, doctor or lawyer. And she was wanting me to be, you know, the first professional, yeah, in the family. And yeah, so I was. I did every entrepreneurial business you can imagine as a kid, car wash, newspaper, route, recycling, baseball cards, lemonade, stands like anything you could think of it did, And just was born with this sort of dry to want to like work hard and build something and.
Entrepreneurial and casinos as well.
Yeah, a little of that too, A little of that too. We used to go down to ac and sneak into the casino in high school, get all dressed up and like jacket and stuff like that and see how long we could stay there before we got kicked out on age. But yeah, then I graduated in ninety three. It wasn't like you would just go work for a startup at that time. It was still kind of early days of tech, and so I went to work at a bank. Started out in Banker's Trust and then credits was first Boston
San Jua Bank. So I was in financial risk management there and one day, like this is in the like late nineties, tech is booming, yeah, and all everyone's talking about is these like hot startups, tech companies and things, and I'd save a decent amount of money, and I just one day said that's it. I'm going to be an entrepreneur. I woke up that morning and said I'm going to do it. I walked into my boss's office
and I said I'm quitting to be an entrepreneur. And he's like what He's like, get out of here, go back to the work. You know much I'm paying you is what he say. What he said, And I'm like, no, I got to do this. He's like, all right, you must have a great idea, and I'm like no, I just need to do this because I'm like all in kind of guy, Like I was just doing banking so intensely I couldn't like focus. So he said, you're serious.
I said yeah. He said, all right, well, I don't know what you're going to do, but like put me down for fifty thousand. So I got that fifty thousand dollars investment. And I didn't know anyone else with money, so I asked, I said, well, now you're my investor, do you have any other people that you could recommend? And he recommended a couple of people. They recommended a
couple of people. I wind up raising money from sixty five like angel investors with an average tex size of like eighty thousand dollars.
So that was like the first business.
This would be four diapers a little bit.
Yeah, this is in the early days. How old were you when he said he was paying a lot of money? How much was he paying you?
Yeah? So I was twenty seven years old, five hundred thousand a year. Wow then, which was big money? Wow, it was big money. I was executive is big money?
You're one of the top earners.
I was executive vice president of the bank at twenty seven funny story. But I went to see this guy, Jerry Goldstein a couple of years later after i'd been out of the air and doing my startup, and had lunch with him and he's like, I still can't believe you. You know, you just quit on me and just did this entrepreneur thing. But but it seems like it's working out great. He's like, how old are you now? You're thirty five. I said no, I'm like twenty nine. And
he said that's impossible. And I said, what do you mean. He goes, well, but then when I hired you to be the EVP, you were only twenty six years old. That's impossible. He said, no, I was twenty six. Yeah, he said, yeah, I guess the bald head threw me off.
This is like, this is a huge breakthrough for the ball This is amazing.
It was a shameless for you guys.
Yeah, exactly, we're doing it. Mark. One of the.
Stories that it resonated so well with me is either ultimate missionary not mercenary. You're all in you talk about mission, but you said a story talking about baseball cards. You had a Reggie Jackson story, and I think this story, I think we were ten or eleven years old, tell me that story because I think it tells me a lot about who you are and what you mean.
Yeah, that's that's still triggering to this day. So fifth grade, never forget it. It was a you know baseball cards when you used to have to flip them heads or tails on the floor. There was this bully and it was a flipping for Reggie Jackson. And originally I thought it was going to be whoever flip more heads wins Reggie Jackson. And he's like, no, you gotta flip ten
heads in a row. Wow. And I was like, well, then out of our place, like, no, you're playing you go like and I was like, and I flipped ten heads in a row, and I was like, wow, I did it. Even though he forced me into this, I got the Reggie Jackson and I was so happy. I'm walking away and he comes over and he punches me in the face takes the Reggie Jackson. So I go and tell the teacher. Now I'm like ten years old. They go tell the teacher and I say, hey, I
won this Reggie Jackson. And he punched me and took the card and the teacher said, well, whose card is it? I said, well, it was his card, but then I want it and she's like, well, if it was his card, then I'm sorry. And to this day, bullies are triggering I get I asked like people on an interview, every interview, I asked them, look, get your blood boiling. What gets you just angry? You know, everyone's got that thing. And every once in a while somebody asked me, well, what
gets your blood boiling? And it's always the bully.
Well, and to that point, I mean, you come up against. What's interesting is as an entrepreneur, you come up against I'm not calling them bullies necessarily, but some of the biggest companies in the world as competitors. And so that is what you just described fuel or is it motivation? Like hell yeah, I can't play it.
I can't even describe. And Alex and I talk about this of what it feels like when you're up against a bully. It is and I think Alex said, this is okay, if.
I whatever you want, I mean, I mean, I mean, I'm TV.
Alex said it. He said, I don't like bullies either. He's like, I rather like lose everything I have than lose to a bully. I'll sleep under a freaking bridge, I don't care, And then like that resonated with me. I'm like the same way. I rather lose every single penny and sleep under a bridge with Alex than lose to a bully. But if it's like, if somebody is reasonable, on the other hand, they can get away with a lot. With me, I'm very empathetic. I think Alex is very similar.
That's why we kind of connected and fair and fair, fair and like empathetic and sort of like if somebody comes up to you and says, hey, sorry, like you know, it's like okay, Like it's okay, like even if they screwed you over whatever, like there's empathy there. But if you're going to just play the bully all the way through now, So.
Mark, that's one of the things, Jason, I don't know if you know this, but this is one of the most incredible things about Mark, besides him being a great business person and a father and all of that and a great friend. How have you been one of the most highest paced seals of all time at Walmart e commerce? You grew that business from eight billion to fifty billion. You've done all these great things. How in thirty plus
years having you sued anyone and never been sued. Now that is a feed on his own.
How again, it comes to the fairness thing. I can see somebody's point of view, So somebody even is the least bit reasonable, then there's always a resolution, right, And I'm don't have the ego to say, you know, and I think it's the opposite of my dad, And so I learned this from my dad. My dad was the kind of guy that, like, if he thought you were trying to like negotiate too hard, he would just on principle,
refuse to negotiate. So I can kind of learn that and like saw the turmoil that that causes when you dig your heels in on principle and ego as opposed to like just check the ego. It doesn't matter if you're going to be reasonable. We'll debate it and debate it, and I'll listen, and there's got to be a resolution because you feel that way for a reason. And I
think that's always been the case, is that people. I think when you be vulnerable, people be vulnerable back, you let down your card, you talk it through, and people generally, I think one a good thing.
Stitch that together for us with that is a very like humane and empathetic approach to business. Being an entrepreneur is hard, and starting something is hard. And so take us back, you make that huge decision, you go in, you quit your half a million dollar a year job, you start a company, then you eventually start diapers dot com. Like, what's the journey briefly that gets you from I'm working on Wall Street to I'm selling stuff online.
I mean, it started very simply. I think I always tell people it's the the ideas usually not the thing that decides whether it works it doesn't work. It all comes down to execution and people, and bad ideas can work and good ideas could fail. And the idea was quite simple. People weren't really able to buy diapers online at normal like Walmart target prices. It just didn't exist. If you went on Amazon, which was one of the only places selling diapers, there were ten dollars more in
Amazon than they were in Walmart, for example. And it just seems strange to me. I'm like, it's kind of a pain. You have babies, you got to go out to the store, you come back. Why is it so expensive? And I think in the early days of e commerce. They just marked up a box of diapers because they're heavy and it costs a lot to ship. And that was kind of like just like the very simple, simple approach. And the thinking at the time was, well, why are diapers in Walmart and Target a lost leader? Why do
they not make any money in diapers? And people in retail, because I didn't know retail at the time, said well, that's because they drive people into the store they have to get diapers, and when they come in for the diapers, they buy everything else.
So that's interesting.
So if they can be a loss leader for brick and mortar, why couldn't they be a loss leader online? Now, the loss albeit was a lot larger because you had to pay for shipping, right, but you also had a lot more products online than in the store. So it's
the same thing. If I can lose lose a dollar and go in to Walmart and make two, great if I lose ten dollars online on a box of diapers and make twenty sort of the same math, right, And so that was the big vision is let's sell diapers, deliver them overnight at Walmart prices, build a relationship with parents, and then sell them everything else.
I mean on that point of entrepreneurship. I mean, you talk about this a lot, in this notion that the struggle is real and you embrace it in a lot of ways. And how does that come up as you mentor people?
I always tell peopleople see like the successes, say, oh you had one successfullized with two three, and now it's wonders working again. Like you make it look easy and it's anything but easy. I just want people to know, like I feel like I'm eating glass every day and just hoping that it doesn't get I don't get cut on the way down, like every day. That's what it feels like. And it's the entrepreneurs that don't get down on themselves and think I'm a failure? What am I
even doing this for? I can be doing other things, Like once your brain goes there, you're done, Like it requires. Being an entrepreneur is going to You're gonna face really tough times. And it's those that go into what I call the sixth gear, where you literally give it every ounce of energy you've got more than one hundred hours
a week. Your brain is focused and dialid in on exactly what you need to do, and you can couple that with the ability to take risk and try things and move very, very very quickly, and be comfortable with uncertainty. If you've got those attributes as an entrepreneur, you're gonna be okay, You're going to figure it out. But it's
not easy. It's really really hard and hiring. And I take a lot of pride in being more on the empathetic side of being a leader, because I think at the end of the day, you can only do so much as an individual. It's about the team and you have to create the right culture. Culture in a startup is not ping pong tables and stuff like that. It really is about how you treat people and the value
system of the organization. That's one part of a framework that I've created called VCP, Vision Capital, People, and I think as a startup founder, you need to focus the vast majority, if not all, your time, thinking about VCP, vision Capital and People.
I want to frame this in the context of Wonder because it's such an interesting company. So what does that vision say for Wonder?
So the vision says, we want to create the super app for meal time anytime somebody wants to eat a meal, breakfast, lunch, or dinner. They'd be able to go to the Wonder app and whether it be food delivered hot to their door, whether it be a Blue Apien meal kit, whether it be an oven ready meal. Eventually in the future, sure groceries with recipes. It could be booking a reservation to a restaurant. Even like anytime you want to eat, you
pull up the app. And then in the future, when we are covering all of your meal occasions, we can track your health calories, fat, protein, vitamins, we can give you a health score. We can use AI to meal plan based on a budget and how your lifestyle, how you operate. Some days Friday Saturday, you want food delivered to your door. You don't want to do anything. Sometimes Wednesday, Thursday it's an oven ready meal, you just throw it
in the oven. On Monday, you're willing to do some cooking and make it fun and get a meal kit delivered. So that's really the big vision for.
So tonight, I'm in the Upper West Side, I want to have dinner. If I go to the Wonder app, how many restaurants and how quickly would dinner get to my house?
So right now we've got twenty five restaurants live on the Upper west Side on the winder app, and you can order from all the restaurants and a single delivery and a single checkout, so everybody in the family can
order from a different restaurant. All the food will be cooked and delivered with our own delivery network in under thirty minutes, and the food's going to come hot because we won't deliver more than six minutes and so from the time it leaves the kitchen til tom it gets to your doors maximum six minutes in the Upper west Side, So this food's coming hot. It's great quality, get multi restaurant ordering, it's on time, it's accurate. So there's a lot of benefits of vertical kind of creation.
Have you got from some of the consumers that have tasted.
Yeah, I mean it's been We have some of the best chefs in the world on the platform. Jose Andres, Bobby Flay, Marcus Samuelson, J. J. Johnson, Mark Murphy, We've got Nancy Silverton, We've got a great group of chefs. The chefs are I think, really love wonder and the customers do as well, So we get really really high marks from customers and the overall experience.
Before we get too far into the current, go a little bit back to the past, because it feels like so much of what you're doing with Wonder what you guys are doing as investors really does come from those early entrepreneurial days because you're going up against massive companies. Like what are the lessons that you take from competing with the Amazon, for instance?
I think the ability to take risk and understand where you are on the risk spectrum. So the lower the probability of success, the more risk you need to take. When you have a high probability success, you take less risk. That's why a big company they're not taking legal risk or any kind of risks like that why things are working. It's good when you're a startup in your early stages
and you talk to a lawyer. They shouldn't be giving you the same advice about whether you should do something or not do something when you're a startup versus a big company, But lawyers tend to give you the same advice.
It is what it is.
You as an entrepreneur need to be able to understand that the biggest risk you take as a startup is you're going to run out of money and die. People often underestimate the risk of the status quo and they overestimate the risk of change, and entrepreneur has to be the opposite.
Do you remember a time when you had to take a bigger risk than maybe you were comfortable with.
Well, i'll tell I mean, i'll tell you when there's an easy example. Two years ago, we had four hundred and fifty trucks on the road and we had tested a brick and mortar and the brick and mortar was doing really well, and felt like that was the future of the company. Better eternal capital, more profitable, more scalable. But we only had one brick and mortar. It was tested for a month. We had four hundred and fifty trucks on the road that were working really well, and
customers loved it. Investors, press, employees, everybody loved the trucks. But you have to acknowledge and be completely objective and say, okay, it's still a startup. What's the probability you continue with the truck business? And then you got to always be the objective and looking for opportunities to take risk to increase the probability success. And when I saw that brick
and mortar I said, that's it. That's going to improve the probability of getting a big outcome, the big outcome much more scalable, got it much higher return on capital, more profitable, and so just felt like that was the right But still in that position, if you're in a big company, do you literally tell employees, press shareholders, these trucks that have been working, that we've been talking about for three years, We're going to stop it, take revenue
to zero, sell the trucks, and start over with this brick and mortar based on one month's worth of experience. That's what I'm talking about. And now when I did it, people said that's crazy. And now today, fast forward, we're sixteen months removed from that, people are saying, I can't imagine us not being in the brick and mortar business
and being in the truck business still. So as an entrepreneur, the key learning there is being really objective and thinking the trucks are working, and thinking, oh, we're great, don't take that risk. Things are good. When things are good in a startup, you still have an eighty percent chance of dying, right, Like, that's just the way, that's just the nature of startup, right And so you have to like be you have to understand what you're dealing with
and factor that into your decision making. That is really really important, and it's the objectivity coming up.
Mark discusses selling the companies that made him famous as an entrepreneur and what he learned working inside Walmart and Amazon.
And Mark, I've heard you say, you know, putting the car in front of the horse. Talk a minute bit about that.
As an entrepreneur, you've heard the phrase don't put the cart in front of the horse, and I think people sort of trained to think that way, like don't get ahead of yourself. I think, as an entrepreneur in the early days, because the risk of it not working is so high or the risk of it working is so low, that there's a benefit to putting the cart in front of the horse to sort of like flush things out
faster and get the answer faster than you ordinarily would. So, for example, when I was actually at the bank, I started this financial Risk Management certification exam the FRM with my colleague Lev and I was twenty four years old. There was no certification exam for financial risk managers like a CPA and things, and I just thought like, hey, let's create a certification exam. And friends would say, well,
you can't do. Who's going to take your exam? Like you're a twenty four year old kid, They're not going to take your exam. So I said, all right, good point. So we created like the Global Association of Risk Professionals. It was an association. We said, oh, the association will give the exam. They said, yeah, but you just created that, so how does that work? So I said, good point. Okay, so this is putting the cart in front of the horse.
Rather than go through this whole like build an examination, bring in professors, all the things that you would need to do, you basically just put on the website. In one weekend, here are all the topics, here are some books to read. The exam is in May in New York City, and it's five hundred and fifty bucks if you want to sit for the exam. How's it? One weekend, put the cart in front of the horse. Started getting checks, one check, two checks, three checks. I think it was
thirty four checks that we got the first year. So we said, all right, I guess we got to I guess we got to create this examination.
Then you get horse.
Now then you get the professors, then you put the exam together, then you administer it, and then you do it. And so that's just a great example of like you don't know huntil you do it. So how do you take the biggest step you can take with the minimum amount of effort and time to kind of flush out
the answer as quickly as possible. So that's the technique that that's to start a whole company, But inside of a startup, inside of a big company, there are lots of opportunities to sort of like very quickly put the cart in front of the horse, to learn something that could dictate the future strategy of the of the organization. And so that's a good good lesson there.
So with the sale of diapers dot com it goes to Amazon. That's the story in and of itself. Some people, having gone through that successfully, it'd be like, yeah, entrepreneurship done it. Maybe I'll go go do something else. What was your mindset as an entrepreneur? What did you learn? What had you learned at that point? I guess that sort of fueled you and about the role of an entrepreneur.
I sold diapers dot Com Amazon, and I wasn't I made generational wealth as I had nobody in my family ever made money before. But I was depressed and my co found at the time of Vinnie Burr, we basically both felt the same way. And after the money was wired to our bank account, we sort of said, like, we should be celebrating right now, and we're both like depressed, and we went and we had a drink and we're just like, man, Like, it just goes to show you
it wasn't about the money. Like the mission that we had set out was kind of like crushed with the sale to Amazon, and we had just really big dreams for what that could be and it was kind of over. Even though it was a great exit. We made a lot of money and Cheryl's made a lot of money, it was depressing and so I felt like, you know, there was just some unfit finished business in e commerce.
We had learned so much, had new great talented people, had access to capital, and went after it with Jet again. And I think one of the reasons why I think we were able to grow so fast and have all this happened in twenty six month period was because we kind of felt behind. It was like diapers would have been here by now, had, we just stuck with it,
and so there's a little bit of catch up. I kind of regret kind of going as fast as we did on Jet because I think some of the core principles that I have around around entrepreneurship were sort of broken during that run. But again, it was a successful exit for shareholders, for employees, and for Walmart.
So Mark, I want to go back to Jet dot com. You went from deck to exit in about twenty six months.
That's incredible. There were some articles around the time that they may have overpaid, but as somebody said from inside the company, is one of the greatest acquisitions that Walmart made because along with Jet came Mark Lori and they wanted to kind of turbo charge their e commerce business that were doing around eight billion dollars a year, which was pretty pretestrin for that, and you took it with your team to about fifty billion in like four years.
How hard was that and how the heck did you do that?
We had a great team at Jet that really helped. Once I came into Walmart and just assessed the situation was we needed to change the narrative. I think the narrative around Walmart eCOM was they were losing big time to Amazon. I think as a result, it was challenging for Walmart to recruit great people into e commerce business. I think Walmart had had great people on the store side of the business, a very big, profitable business, but on the eCOM side, Walmart wasn't known as a tech company.
I probably made a series of decisions that any one decision on its own, if you just isolated and studied, it would have been a bad decision. But the sum total of a bunch of bad decisions actually turned out
to be a really good decision. One bad decision would be, you know, we had the cost to acquire a customer and the lifetime value, and typically you want to have the lifetime value of a customer some multiple of what it costs to acquire, so that you were pay to acquire and then you make a return.
And it makes sense.
Well, they didn't have a very high lifetime value of a customer, and so the cost to acquire customer in the LTV was sort of upside down. You wouldn't typically recommend spending marketing into an upside down scenario, but my view was we need to get top line moving, and
so the first year we grew. I think again spending marketing I would say inefficiently, not something that on an isolated decision would recommend, but getting that business growing, and people were like, wow, what's going on over Walmart e commerce? And there are some tech folks, so investing the styles are growing. So a series of decisions like that interesting that helped change the narrative because at the end of the day, I knew we had to have a clear
vision as VCP. We had the capital from Walmart, what we didn't have was the people, and so how do we change the narrative to bring in the very best people in the world. And I think we were able to bring in some amazing people that really helped transform the business. So I was sort of helped be the catalyst to it, but it was the great people we hired that ultimately executed and grew that business.
And what is it like for someone who thinks so much about entrepreneurism and startups to be in I mean talk about the belly of the beast. I mean, you're in literally one of the largest companies in the world. How do you create a playbook that is both true to you and successful inside this massive organization?
Yeah. I mean, I was fortunate that Doug McMillan and the board Walmart, so so here are the keys, we need help on e comm and sort of they definitely let me run the first couple of years to kind of get a lot of these things in motion. I think maybe they wish that things happened faster than they did, but it was it was tough to turn over that that team and culture and get that moving. But I think in order to be successful there you have to
be a sort of missionary. And just like when we sold the company, I just felt like I was in service to Doug and the board and I was going to do whatever I could to do what's in the best interest to Walmart. It wasn't about me, It wasn't about the team, wasn't about Jet. One of the first decisions I made was to merge Jet and Walmart into one e commerce site. It didn't make sense to have too that. Of course, didn't want to see my baby
get merged in, but that was the right decision. So I think if you go into a big company like that and you approach it with this idea that like, whatever's in the best interest of the company, they acquired us, and you put all your thought and effort into that, then good things will happen.
And Mark just one simple question. I mean for me, it's always intriguing. And when you build a company from deck to exit in twenty six months, how does Walmart get ahold of Mark? I mean you to get an investment banker and says, hey, Walmart's interested or Amazon's interested? How does that work?
Both Amazon sale and the Walmart sale? No banker? Wow. So it was just direct relationship to start off, as like, hey, they meet each other, and then you know, I think when I met Doug, I really liked him and he wanted to get e commerce moving and go after Amazon, and I did too, and so we just sort of bonded over that. And when we were.
Doing you had a cop I mean you had a common foe in Amazon.
Fair. That's fair. That's fair.
Because your experience with Amazon, I mean they bought you and shut it down.
I didn't have the best experience selling diapers dot Com to Amazon. A much better experience selling Jet to Walmart, That's for sure. Learned a lot of lessons in both cases.
What was the main lesson you took from Amazon? From the Amazon acquisition to the Walmart acquisition.
Well, it's interesting. This is more nuanced. But it's really important to me, is you know, I didn't like the Amazon culture, like it wasn't a good fit for me. One of the things I came to appreciate about Amazon and about culture in general, is the most important thing is consistency hiring people that excel in that culture, like that's the most and Amazon was really good at that.
So they knew exactly, this is our culture. These are the kind of people that are successful, and they weed out people that aren't and they find the people that are. And so even though I disagreed with the culture, it actually was a good culture. One of the big things was and they are not afraid to say this, and that's what I respect it. They don't like social cohesion. They think you should be very direct and tell somebody if you don't like that, just tell them right to
their face. I don't like that. That's bad, And I'm a little bit more like social cohesion empathy. I would never tell somebody straight like that. I would do it in a much nicer way. They say, no, that takes too much time. It causes groupthink to waste the time, get to the answer, get to the point. Some people love that. Some people operate to say just tell me, I don't care, don't beat around the bush, don't sugarcoat it.
I like to sugarcoat things because I think people human, they have emotions, and again I'm trying to get the very best out of people. In my view is if people feel respected, they feel you're not being kind of sent not treating and bad that they're going to develop a loyalty and there's a trust that develops, and from that trust and loyalty comes that fire to want to like be a missionary and want to like help push the company forward. And that's what I'm looking for. Mark, you and I talk.
About trust, and I've learned this from you. Talk a little bit about your philosophy about trust and how you usually get more trust from people that work with you or for you by trusting more.
It's just starting from a place of trust until they do something to lose that trust. Yeah. But the three core values at Wonder and a Jet trust, transparency, and fairness. And I truly believe that if people feel trusted and you're transparent with information not the sort of your bad it's here's all the information. Here are the financials, here's the state of the company. Here's where we are, here's our compensation system, here's what everybody makes in the company.
Be super transparent and they have that, and you're fair and equitable, and you create a safe working environment. If you have that set of values, then I think people find it very empowering and that's how you get the best out of people, in my view, and soays always look to create that sort of empowering culture.
So Marklorie, what advice would you give a ten year old, a twenty year old, a teenager that wants to be the next Mark Glory? What advice would you give them?
I get this question a lot, and people say, if you had to do it over again, what would you do? I get really lucky. But I think I've noticed them two daughters twenty four and twenty one years old, and so they're asking me for advice a lot. And I think people at that age, in their teens or twenties, they feel like they need to have it all figured out.
What do I need to do? It's very mechanical. Do I need to get this degree to then do that, to then do this, and do I do this and would what I would say to everyone at that age is it's important that you just focus on learning as much as you can. Finding mentors or people that have been successful that you respect in terms of their values.
You'll learn a lot about leadership, a lot about people, lessons that you don't even realize you're learning just to osmosis being around the person that will pay huge dividends in the future. So I think I think learning is really important. I think also following your passion. So like when my daughters asked me, like, I don't know what to do? Should I do this? Should I? It's like, what do you want to do? What's going to make
you happy? Like this month, next month, and like, yeah, but I want to do that, this would make me happy, But then I won't be able to get here or get there, and I just sort of disagree with that philosophy. I think follow your passion if you've got to drive something burning inside you that you want to go do or learn about, like the time to do it is when you're young, and that'll take you places that you
have no idea and can plan out. But I do know if you follow your passion, you surround yourself with great people, you learn, and you give more than you take, and give without any regard for what you might get in the future. And if you come from that place of giving, surrounding yourself with great people, learn, follow your passion, I think magical things will happen.
Great Mark, Thank you so much, Thank you, Mark, Thank you.
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